Tesla is nothing if not ambitious, and how much more ambitious could it be to demonstrate the prowess of its autonomous driving technology than to attempt a coast-to-coast road trip across the United States without any driver input? The Wall Street Journal has reported that the company is doing just that.
Spanning from Los Angeles to New York, and planned to take place by the end of next year, the journey was announced by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at a conference call last week, while providing details about the company’s latest Autopilot 2.0 hardware, coming as standard on all new Tesla vehicles.
The report claims that the company could introduce fully-autonomous driving features in production vehicles by 2018, putting it significantly ahead of other carmakers, which have vowed to produce their own systems by 2020 at the earliest.
However, the self-driving software still needs to be validated and has yet to achieve approval from regulators. Musk said that Tesla expects to achieve these milestones in time, ultimately leading to significantly less dangerous vehicles than they are currently.
“It will take us some time into the future to complete validation of the software and to get the required regulatory approval, but the important thing is that the foundation is laid for the cars to be fully autonomous at a safety level we believe to be at least twice that of a person, maybe better,” said Musk.
Tesla’s bold plan comes amid increased scrutiny surrounding its Autopilot system, after drivers using it were involved in two fatal accidents, one in China, the other in the US. An update introduced last month – which places greater reliance on radar sensors – would have prevented the latter incident, Musk claimed.
Some observers are worried that the functionality lulls drivers into complacency behind the wheel. The German transportation ministry has asked the company to drop the Autopilot term in ads describing the system, while the California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has drafted rules to prevent the use of the term in marketing materials for systems similar to Tesla’s.
Musk was frustrated with the media’s attention being focused on Autopilot crashes relative to automotive crashes in general, saying, “It does not reflect well upon the media.” He added that negative stories making people wary of using autonomous vehicles were effectively “killing people” since the technology has actually made driving safer.
Autopilot 2.0’s rollout sees Tesla, from now on, equipping the Model S, Model X and upcoming Model 3 with eight surround cameras that will provide up to 250 metres of 360-degree visibility around the car. Supporting them are 12 updated ultrasonic sensors which allow for detection of both hard and soft objects, at nearly twice the distance of previous units.
Meanwhile, a forward-facing radar with enhanced software provides additional data on what’s ahead on a redundant wavelength, capable of seeing through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead. Processing all that data is an Nvidia Titan GPU supercomputer with more than 40 times the power of the current system.
All these features are claimed to provide the cars with Level 5 autonomy (fully-autonomous driving with zero driver input required), in accordance with the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) guidelines.
However, they will ship without certain Autopilot features, including automatic emergency braking (AEB), collision warning, lane keeping and adaptive cruise control, as the company wants to further calibrate the system using real-world driving data. Once the features are validated, the cars will be updated over-the-air to unlock them. Musk said that updates are expected to come every two to three months.
Tesla has already showcased the system’s capabilities in an earlier video, with a Model X picking the “driver” up, driving him to the Tesla office, dropping him off and then parking itself, all without any human input.
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Must get the concept right. The autopilot can control the vehicle, but there is a need for a person to control the autopilot.
Aeroplanes have been using autopilots for decades, but you don’t see an aeroplane flying without at least one trained pilot in the cockpit.
KIT..come and get me…..